GoingGreen Sounds A Bit Off

by Stowe Boyd

Tony Perkins of AlwaysOn is holding a GoingGreen conference in Sausalito, where venture capitalists and captains of industry are going to lay out their plans for making billions out of the green revolution.

In principle, I am all for new money being poured into green tech, but some of the wording for the sessions goes against the grain:

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10:00 am The Agricultural Revolution
From high-rise agriculture to genetic engineering to enlightened, knowledge intensive advances in agronomy, food production is on the brink of being cleaner and more productive than ever. Who are designing organic pesticides, livestock that require fewer inputs of hormones & antibiotics, hydroponic farms that use waste water and solar energy to grow food in warehouses, high-technology to expand locally grown food production? What companies and technologies are at the forefront of delivering this new and greener green revolution in agriculture?

Moderator: John Rennie, Editor-in-Chief, Scientific American
David Cope, President & CEO, Purfresh Inc.
Michael Dowgert, EVP Marketing & Business Development, Netafim
Richard Hamilton, CEO, Ceres Inc.
Rengarajan Ramesh, General Manager, GE Water & Process Technologies

The editor-in-chief of Scientific American, John Rennie, on green agriculture? Is that the way to think about food? And 'livestock that need fewer inputs of hormones & antibiotics'? Um... those are heirloom livestock, boys. Just get them out on the grass and out of the feedlots. But this sounds like we are going to be genetically engineering animals that will be like Monsanto tomatoes: they are breed to be easily transportable, grow fast, and taste like cardboard. Oh, and for the livestock, can happily live their lives standing in a feed pen with a tube in their mouths force feeding them a endless diet of corn syrup.

Yikes.

Hydroponic farming is another space age delusion, a scheme to divorce food from the ground. Are these guys afraid of dirt and fungus?

I guess it's possible that the participants have different aspirations, but the session copy reads like a dystopic, Blade-Runneresque nightmare.

Other sessions sound interesting, like this one:

3:30 pm The Smart, Green Megacity

Over half the world's population now lives in cities, and even as human population stablizes, migration to urban centers will cause cities everywhere to experience rapid growth. What technologies and practices inform the creation of cities with millions of inhabitants from scratch? How will they manage energy, water, food, shelter & transportation?
Moderator: Ed Ring, Editor, EcoWorld
Jim Butcher, Managing Director, Office of the Environment, Morgan Stanley
Matthew Trevithick, Partner, Venrock
Ajit Nazre, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
John Greenwood, Portfolio Manager, CalPERS AIM

But I did a little digging about the moderator, Ed Ring, and a recent editorial of his at EcoWorld is entitled "Is The World Warming Or Not?" in which he suggests we are rushing to judgment about global warming:

In a post last week entitled “Debate vs. Demonization“ we questioned the tendency on the part of global warming alarmists to demonize anyone who wishes to question the reality, the scope, the causes, or the prescriptions for global warming.

Oh yes, all us global warming alarmists.

My sense is that GoingGreen is motivated by some deeply wrongheaded principles, and while they may not be shared by all the speakers, choosing someone like Ed Ring to moderate confirms that Tony Perkins is somewhere to the right of Dick Chaney. I wonder what John Rennie -- who has faced down the intelligent design idiots on numerous occasions -- would make of Ring's thoughts on global warming?